As Devoney Looser wrote recently for the Washington Post, if we want to look for great women writers, perhaps we should look beyond the shadow of Jane Austen or Charlotte and Emily Brontë and look for originality in other ways.
She’s the author of Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës, the first biography of sisters Jane and Anna Maria Porter, who between them published 26 novels.
Looser tells Jim Mora, the Porter sisters were household names, globally famous and “geniuses”, yet are little heard of today.
“Their writing and all they achieved is incredibly important because they came to it with no more than a charity school education, they really just supported each other and built each other into these literary powerhouses.”
Photo: Bloomsbury Publishing
There are 7000 letters documenting their lives as writers, single women and celebrities, Looser says.
“What’s interesting to me about the Porter sisters is that they saved every scrap of paper they had because they believed there would be a biography written about them and because they knew themselves to be famous.”
But the Porters went from having astonishing acclaim in the 19th Century to being relegated to Classics Illustrated comic books in the 20th Century.
“I think the reason why the Porter sisters were once so celebrated and are now so obscure is because their novels started to be associated with children’s literature, started to be abridged and became classed in the academic world as minor – and that’s the kiss of death.”
Looser believes they unfairly fell out of the canon. The Porters were innovators, she says.
“I think their novels haven’t travelled down to us in as appealing a way as Austen and the Brontës have, yet I think they still deserve to be great.”
Jane Porter took things seen in historical novels and poetry and combined them with the courtship novel – to create historical romance.
“She was taking real history and combining it with the kinds of things we’d expect to see in a novel of courtship, so I think she was an innovator.”
Her best-selling historical romance Thaddeus of Warsaw was published in 1803.
It was their childhood friend Sir Walter Scott, however, who would eventually be credited with the origin of the historical romance despite publishing his novel Waverly in 1814.
The sisters eventually referred to what he did as a kind of theft, “they called him a kind of vampire, they certainly felt very wronged by what he did”.
Unfortunately, Looser says, historical fiction doesn’t age as well as gothic romance or domestic courtship novels.
“In some ways I think to read the Porters is to need to know the 19th century and whatever era they’re writing about and that’s a hard sell.
“That said, there are parts of their novels that are absolutely brilliant, they include really interesting features, they include great heroic men who are a little too perfect perhaps but also these really interesting femme fatales, women who are cross dressing, lots of emotion and incredible things the sisters were doing in their novels with battle scenes that we just quite moving.”
The sister’s themselves were doing things that Jane Austen’s fiction from the period would tell us they shouldn’t have been, Looser says.
“They were taking private walks through the woods with men...There were things that were happening behind closed doors that were not supposed to be happening but we know from their letters what they were doing.
“There’s a moment in Jane Porter’s life where she’s in love with a man accused of adultery and she goes out in the world to try to prove his innocence or his lack of culpability. She says here are women trying to solve this man’s problems in a ways that the world says women aren’t even supposed to look at, much less know about or be involved in.
“They were involved in all sorts of things polite women weren’t supposed to be involved in.”
Looser would love to see their stories one day told in film, though if you look at retellings of the lives of other women writers, like Emily Brontë, they’re often centred around a supposed love affair.
Why can’t these women have been single and have lived full and interesting lives? Looser asks.
“Women writers who don’t marry but write about love, we think there must have been some real life love loss that we’re eager to recover and of course, I think that’s a mistake on our part.”
There are many ways women writers have learnt about love, she says. “But the idea that we have to put them all in neat little packages having one lost love that inspired everything that they did, that I think is a bit of a stretch.”
